With our farmers’ markets going full force rippling with tomatoes, corn, berries, fruits and every kind of harvested vegetable able to grow well enough in our climate, I look specifically at what I can use to make this–the quintessential summer cobbler with fruit, berries or a mixture.
Defining what a cobbler is can be tricky business. In strict culinary parlance, it’s basically stewed fruit topped with a kind of drop-biscuit dough and baked.
But what also doubles in cobbler-speak are preparations like pandowdy, grunt, slump and sonker, which is a deep-dish pie unique to North Carolina country cooking.
The New York Times recently published their usual definitive take on cobbler and offered a mixed fruit variety topped with a sweet biscuit dough. Yet there are variations on cobblers that I find are not quite like their cousins of the slump-grump-pandowdy family. You can wrap up summer fruit in batter doughs, cake-like toppings and pastry covers, the latter being my favorite way with cobblers.
I did, however, make the recipe (see link) from the Times, and it was delicious (see recipe link). I made one major change, however. The recipes calls for 10 cups of mixed fruits and berries, which I halved down to 5 cups, enough to fill an 8-inch square pan instead of the 9 by 13 inch pan that was in the original recipe.
The result was a smaller, more manageable cobbler and since I didn’t change the biscuit topping one bit I liked that it covered about 90 percent of the filling instead of leaving large spaces in the original recipe. The filling I devised was 3 cups blueberries, 1 cup blackberries and several peaches and 1 cup strawberries (available from growers who cultimate ever-bearing), which measured 5 heaping cups. It was sweetened with less sugar (about 1/2 to 3/4 cup, depending on tartness of fruit) and I used a tablespoon of tapioca starch as the thickener. This is not easy to find but Hannaford carries it. It’s a great thickener for fruit pies and cobblers, which dissolves completely in the fruit juices rather than tricky tapioca pearls or cornstarch or flour.
Still my favorite cobbler is the kind made with a pastry topping. I make two styles: one that’s a crunchy cobbler where pie dough is mixed in the filling that acts as a thickener. It has an amazingly gooey texture and works well with peaches or apples. See the recipe link.
The other style is one I made earlier this week to bring to a friend’s house for dinner on Peak’s Island.
I made the dough the night before and baked the cobbler first thing in the morning. The unusual ingredients are something I borrowed from cookbook author Edna Lewis who uses crushed sugar flavored with cardamom.
In the recipe link, you’ll see three recipes for cobbler that I posted in an entry last August (August 16th, 20016). I made one change, however, and used a very rich short crust loaded with butter from High-View Farm in Harrison, who makes one of the richest, fattiest butters from raw cream, and to it a touch of freshly rendered lard, which will give you a very flaky crust.
Two types of peach cobbler: crunchy and classic
Ingredients
- Pastry
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 8 ounces butter, chilled and cut into cubes
- 2 tablespoons (1 ounce) lard
- About 1/2 cup ice water
- Butter, cubed
- 1 to 2 tablespoons crushed sugar spiced with cardamom
Instructions
- Put the flour, sugar and salt into the work bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to mix. Give the butter and lard a few minutes in the freezer to make it firm. Add three quarters of the butter lard mixture to the workbowl and give it 6 quick pulses until pieces the size of marbles. Add the remaining butter and lard and continue to pulse 3 or 4 more times until most of it is the usual consistency with some pieces larger than others. Add the water and pulse to bring the dough together.
- Turn out onto a lightly floured board and pat the dough gently to get it into one solid mass. Cut in half, wrap in waxed paper and flatten to round balls about 1 inch thick. Refrigerate overnight or 4 hours as the lease.
- Roll out one piece of dough to fit into an 8-inch square Pyrex dish. Make the filling as directed in the cobbler post and fill the shell with it. But before filling the pastry case sprinkle about 1/4 cup cardamom-crushed sugar. Roil out the top dough and trim and crimp the edges. Make 4 slits in the top of the dough for steam to escape and dot the top with about 2 tablespoons butter and a sprinkling of the crushed sugar (to make cardamom sugar, sprinkled some ground spice into the crushed sugar).